Page 28 of Fractured Allegiance
Dom’s already there when I step in. He doesn’t look up from his phone. Just gestures toward the leather chair beside him.
I take it.
Two men across the room are whispering over contract files. One of them is bleeding slightly from the cuticle. I don’t know why that bothers me more than the room itself.
We sit like that for ten minutes. Then twenty.
Drazen arrives exactly when he means to and not a moment sooner. Unsurprisingly, that’s thirty-three minutes late.
He walks in like he owns the calendar, time, and the temperature in the room. Wearing grey. Always grey. Because black would be too obvious, and color would be too forgiving.
He doesn’t look at me. Not at first.
He just crosses to the table, nods once, and says, “Begin.”
The negotiation is a blur of veiled threats, numbers too round to be real, and one man sweating so hard he soils the signature page before he can finish writing. No one corrects him.
I don’t speak.
That’s not why I’m here.
I’m here because Drazen wants me to be seen. This is what he does. He dangles the things he controls: Money. Fear. Me.
“Interesting signature you’ve adopted lately,” he says suddenly, flipping through a set of documents without even glancing up. “Still using the Carr name, then?”
My spine doesn’t move. “That’s the name I was born with.”
“Mmm,” he hums. “Names are funny, aren’t they? So permanent. Unless someone digs through the wrong archive. Or files a complaint in a small, inconvenient court.”
My pulse skips.
That story — the one he fabricated — it's tucked inside a sealed federal record somewhere. A body with no proof. A shipment with no manifest. A time-stamped call that can’t be traced but somehow always exists.
None of it is real. Yet it’s still real enough to destroy me.
He created it to own me.
And it works.
Every time he smiles like this, I can feel the leash, invisible, but tight.
Dom looks at me from the side, but says nothing.
That’s the game here. They all know I’m not free. They just enjoy watching me act like I am.
After the meeting, Drazen dismisses the rest with a flick of his hand.
“Stay,” he says, not looking at me.
I do.
He walks toward the private alcove behind the screen partition. I follow, steps soft across the marble.
Inside, he pours himself a drink in a lowball glass
Then he finally turns.
“You've been useful,” he says.
